Why More Employers Are Allowing Working From Home?

Employment From HomeIt is an old fashioned view that working from homes is the reserve of the shirker. But in the digital and online age it is becoming more and more common for people to do just this and with good reason, as it is also becoming apparent that there can only be benefits from this practice.

There are two main sides to the benefits of working from home. There are the personal and the factual which represent the employee and the employer respectively.

The personal benefits of working from home are the more obvious and clear ones with the stand out benefit being that in working from home, you can work around your day and your personal schedule. This is a great thing for everybody but can particularly be targeted at certain types of people. These include but are not limited to parents who do not wish to leave their children at nursery. The part time worker who is looking to add an additional wage but doesn’t wish to leave a job that they currently enjoy and retirees, who are perhaps looking for something meaningful they can do at their own pace.

There are other benefits too for an employee. Costs of travelling to and from work are negated offering huge savings on commuting costs, especially for those who travel some distance into large cities. A person can also make their working environment one in which they are comfortable and at ease, which in turn has many positive psychological effects. This has a profound impact on a workers productivity and ability (as detailed below).

It isn’t just the person working from home that can benefit though. A 2013 study by Stanford University found that it can be beneficial for an employer as well as an employee, with a 13% increase in worker performance when employees were allowed to work from home. The majority of this increase was down to employees working more minutes of their shift than if they were in a conventional workplace. This was down to a reduction in the length and frequency in breaks as well as less sick time being taken by staff.

The study also found that employees who worked from home were happier and more productive reporting “substantially higher work satisfaction and attitude scores”. This brings us round to the old adage that a happy worker is a productive worker. The increase in productivity was so prodigious that the company that participated in the study offered the option to work from home to the entire firm with over half of employees choosing to make the switch. This culminated in a in the gains from employees working from home increasing further to a total of a 22%.

This lays out clear benefits from working from home that are not just applicable to the person working from home, but also for an employer. With the potential to increase profit margins by a not inconsiderable sum for what amounts to a relatively small change in the way they carry out business.

 

 

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